Creatures (artificial life program) cover

70/100
Players8 ratings: 70/100
Critics1 review

Where to get it

1996 · Artificial life · God game

Creatures (artificial life program)

Discover a large, living landscape - the surface a world called Albia. You exist in this world only as a virtual presence, a sort of remote-control existence, which the computer portrays as a hand-shaped mouse cursor. In this world are a range of locations and strange creatures, related loosely (and with considerable poetic license) to Northern myth. You begin near to the long-abandoned home of a family of Norns (small furry creatures), where a few eggs, languishing in a broken-down incubator, are almost all that remains of the Nornir race.

Released: 1 November 1996
Platforms: Linux MS-DOS Windows macOS
Genres: Artificial life God game Life simulation Simulation
Developers: —
Publishers: —
Series: Creatures
Perspective: Side view
Themes: Educational
Country: United Kingdom
Age ratings: ESRB E PEGI 3 USK 6
Languages: English
Entry: #1 in Creatures

About

Creatures is an artificial life simulation packaged as a video game developed by British studio Creature Labs for Windows, and was ported to Macintosh, PlayStation, and Game Boy Advance. It is the first game in the Creatures series.

Keywords

exploration
artificial intelligence
talking animals
auto-saving
sleeping
never-ending
trilogy

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Creatures is a game in which the player can hatch and raise anthropomorphic creatures known as Norns.

Notably, the environment was actually a physically constructed model, carefully photographed. This was to keep graphics costs low.

Reception

The PlayStation version received "unfavorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. However, Next Generation said that the PC version "offers one of the most obsessive and entertaining experiences anyone can have in front of the computer." The Electric Playground gave the same PC version universal acclaim, over a month before it was released Stateside.

The PC version sold 100,000 units by November 1997. At the time, John Moore of Mindscape explained that the company "expect[s] to sell more than 200,000 Creatures by the end of the year." Global sales of the game neared 400,000 units by February 1998.

Legacy

The model built during development and photographed as the game's backdrop is held at The Centre for Computing History, where it is on permanent display.

Charlie Brooker, who reviewed the game for PC Zone, would in 2025 use Creatures as the inspiration for a fictional game called Thronglets that was featured in the Black Mirror episode "Plaything".